Plugins

Yesterday Mozilla released a new Firefox 3.6 point release including regular stability fixes and a plugin crash protection system that was originally planned for Firefox 3.7. The crash protection isolates plugins in their own process, meaning that a plugin will not bring down the entire browser when it crashes or freezes. Mozilla states that one Read the rest…

FireBreath 1.0 has been released. What is it you ask? FireBreath aims to be a cross-platform plugin architecture, targeting: NPAPI browsers on windows, mac, and linux: Gecko/Firefox Google Chrome Apple Safari ActiveX Control hosts: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 You can run a script and start hacking on a new plugin, and it Read the rest…

Google has released O3D, a browser plugin that gives developers a 3D API. It sits at a slightly higher level than other APIs (such as OpenGL / Canvas 3D type implementations) so it will be interesting to see if developers like the higher level abstraction, especially for building games. These APIs can also be implemented Read the rest…

Joining the world’s collection of Growl-related libraries is Notimoo, a beautiful Growl implementation for MooTools. It’s a little more sophisticated than most of the Growl ports as it supports persistence messages (that require a user’s click to clear and scroll into view) and allows you to configure where on the screen the messages appear: < Read the rest…

Devon Govett is a fan of the new CSS3 property text-overflow: There are a few CSS features that Microsoft pioneered and has had available to developers in Internet Explorer for a long time now. One of those features is the text-overflow property, which is now in CSS3 and has implementations in Safari, and Opera. Firefox Read the rest…

Lloyd Hilalel and the Yahoo! BrowserPlus team have released a BrowserPlus SDK which allows you to easily create your own services: We’re extremely happy to announce the availability of the BrowserPlus SDK. This first SDK and the accompanying documentation gives you all the tools you’ll need to start extending the web using BrowserPlus. Getting started Read the rest…

Austin Chau and I are here on the Yahoo campus for the Yahoo BrowserPlus release party. I’m going to blog the event as it happens here (Disclosure: I work for Google with the Open Web Advocacy and Gears teams). First, Ernest Delgado, Canvas whiz here at Yahoo, sent me a cool demo showing a prototype Read the rest…

Chromium gained an important patch over the weekend, with the introduction of Greasemonkey support. The patch came from none other than Aaron Boodman, creator of the original Firefox add-on, and also a Google employee. For now, it’s just a patch and it’s not yet clear if and when it will be part of the official Read the rest…

Adam DuVander over at WebMonkey has compiled a list of their five favorite Firebug extensions. The ever-popular YSlow tops the list, but to that they add: Firecookie for easy access to cookie information FirePHP to integrating server-provided PHP debugging information with the Firebug UI Pixel Perfect for overlaying mock-ups on top of the real thing Read the rest…

Edward Tufte has long had a following of fans in the field of information visualizations. Among his interesting taxonomy of visualization types is the “Sparkline“, which he describes as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics”. While Tufte originally suggested that computer displays are too low-resolution to effectively make use of Sparklines (vs. printed page), James Dempster pointed Read the rest…

Dominic Mitchell has created a mini jQuery logging plugin that ties Firebug to the call chain. This means that if you are debugging something you can quickly add a .log(“….”) in the chain: < View plain text > javascript jQuery.fn.log = function (msg) { console.log("%s: %o", msg, this); return Read the rest…

AjaxRain.com, the site dedicated to aggregating Ajax, JavaScript and RIA controls & libraries, has gotten a cool facelift and some much needed features. On top of that, they continue to post controls at an amazing rate with 638 submissions at last count. Some of the new nuggets include: Storing favorites Comments Voting on entries Date Read the rest…

Overuse a term and it becomes meaningless. How much meaning is still in the term ‘Ajax?’ Media Machines tries to wring a little more buzz out of it — first take an X3D and VRML browser plugin with ECMAScript bindings (Flux), combine it with XMLHttpRequest and voila! You’ve got Ajax3D. At least that’s what you Read the rest…